Life happens.
It is not the event that matters, it is the meaning I give it. It is impossible to live a meaningless life. Brains are hardwired to give everything a meaning: we are the co-creators and the recipients of meaning. Neurologically speaking: it is impossible to be objective. By the time I become aware, I have already given the content its meaning.
And herein lies the crunch: the meaning we give it sometimes fit the bill of the 3P’s described by Martin Seligman: Permanence: whatever this means now is what it will mean for the rest of days. Pervasive: this is true all the time, for all events like it, or even just similar to this one. Personal: it is me, just me, and aimed at me. The point made by Seligman is that pessimism, a learned trait based on wrongful over generalisation through the 3P’s, can be contained.
To participate in appropriate meaning creation takes deliberate moments of contemplation and definitely avoiding the 3P’s but seeing things as they are. Seeing things as they are, again, is a deliberate thinking act that requires one to contextualize the information and do the opposite of the 3P’s.
During my recent, quite severe, illness I had a fever dream of a white place. (In retrospect I should maybe call it a “pale place.”) In that place were a variety of people, all strangers, but with a dreamlike certainty I was convinced they were not just ordinary people. What struck me was a sense of them doing nothing but wait. I could not but compare it with Becket’s play “Waiting for Godot.” Two main characters in a place of “”nothing to be done.” They were waiting for Godot. Don’t really know who he is. Don’t know if they are at the right place and time. But, waiting nevertheless.
This waiting, this sense of “nothing to be done”, need not just be passive, I have seen this in people who do a frantic waiting: much activity with activity not going anywhere except “being busy” for now, except today’s list gets replaced by tomorrows list. Just another form of actually doing nothing. Waiting for Godot. The meaning of the “pale place.”
In counterpoint to the “pale place” I became aware of how, sensing this nearness of death, a re-think takes place. But then, I suspect any dramatic experience with some of the following attributes might have the same effect:
- Being confronted in your heart and mind with the question: what is really important? Facing death in one’s own life, or the life of somebody close to you, tend to make one aware of how quickly dying can pounce on a person and take them away. The people left behind, it is said, mourn more for themselves than the departed. The mourning, or remorse, is easy access to think of the incompletes, the good times, and the confronting of the question: what is really important? Frequently this question is sufficient to reprioritise. Richard Rohr in his book “Falling Upward” refers to how one then asks not only different questions but you need a different vocabulary to answer those questions: your perceived world has now changed to the extend where you need new words to answer the new questions. The meaning you pay attention to has a new definition, and what is significant is a surprising extraction from the clutter of the “old world.
- There is a presence in the moment that is complete. Not good, nor necessarily bad, but complete. Louis L’Amour, the writer of cowboy books says it like this: “The desert and the sky both demand aloneness . . . to know them completely one must be alone with them in the midst of their emptiness. At such a time the body grows still, the mind becomes empty, a vast reservoir for the receiving of impressions. The slightest sound is heard or felt.” (Excerpt from L’Amour, Louis: “Shalako.” Bantam Ebooks). This presence also implies a
- Singularity: an autonomous alones that allows for smooth transitioning between an inward and outward focus. It is like a seamless shift from one to the other, wherein the two attentions need each other.
- An appreciation of what is, leading to gratitude that might be so overwhelming that only tears can approximate the expression of it. It is before words, beyond words, it is a compelling challenge for new words.
John Updike: Writing and Death
“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”